Synchronicity

Having shamefully neglected my blogging duties now for two weeks, I, red-faced, beg pardon and proceed to tell you about what I’m reading.

One of our spring titles is a fifty-year-retrospective of descant, the TCU literary magazine that has published, amazingly, such writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Bukowski, and Robert Penn Warren, whose essay on learning to write I am in the process of reading. “Learning to Write” appeared in the spring 1965 issue of descant and tracks the still popular argument about whether or not writing can be learned. Warren posits two notions: “the bag-of-tricks view,” which proclaims that writing is essentially a formal process with rules that can be learned, and “the let-down-the-back-hair view,” which states that writing is a product of inspiration only, a view that has passed down to us from the Greeks.

I think it’s a combination of both, and the terrific essays in Notes from Texas: On Writing in the Lone Star State bear me out. Texas writers from James Reasoner to Don Graham all claim that they found their voice (let down their hair) only when they began to write what they knew (using their bag of tricks). It’s wonderful example of synchronicity when such disparate things come together and prove a point. Read these forthcoming titles and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

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Fifty Years of descant, edited by Dave Kuhne, et al.   
June 2008               
978-0-87565-348-8            
Cloth. $26.50               

Notes from Texas: On Writing in the Lone Star State, edited by W.C. Jameson
April 2008
978-0-87565-358-7
Cloth. $27.95